RSS to Email

Automatically send a campaign whenever you update your site, or populate a draft email with content from an RSS feed with a single click.

An RSS feed is a simple data file which contains some or all of your website updates. People can subscribe to your RSS feed using a feed reader and be automatically notified when your website is updated.

Most content management systems (like Wordpress or Blogger) automatically create RSS feeds for you, so you may have an RSS feed even if you never set it up deliberately. Look for the RSS icon in your browser or on the website itself and take a look at this example RSS feed.

Any RSS feed can be used to automatically import content for your email newsletter, saving you from copying or re-writing items.

Data Repeater <datarepeater type="rss">

The container for the entire RSS content section, the data repeater defines a repeating section of content which will be filled by your specified RSS feed.

Options

src=''

When you want to setup recurring RSS based campaigns, the src attribute is used to define which RSS feed content will be imported from. This attribute is not necessary for recurring campaigns, as the campaign creator will be asked to set the URL as part of the campaign setup.

Example Use

<h3>The latest from our blog</h3>
            <datarepeater type="rss" src="http://abcwidgets.com">
                    <h4><rsstitle tocitem></h4>
                    <p>Posted by <rssauthor /> on <rssitemday />/<rssitemmonth /></p>
                    <rssimage width="600" />
                    <rssbody paragraphs="all" />
            </datarepeater>

<h3>The latest from our blog</h3>
            <h4><a href="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/widget-king-crowned/">Widget King Crowned</a></h4>
            <p>Posted by WidgetLover on 04/12</p>
            <img src="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/images/coronation.jpg" width="600" />
            <p>The Coronation of King Widget II was the ceremony in which the newly ascended monarch,
            Wilbur Widget II, was crowned King of the Widgets.</p>
            <p>The ceremony took place at Euro WidgetWorld on December 3rd, 2011...</p>

            <h4><a href="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/auction-update">Auction</a></h4>
            <p>Posted by WidgetLover on 05/12</p>
            <img src="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/images/auction.jpg" width="600" />
            <p>Get all the latest updates on our Widget Auctions</p>
                                        

RSS Item Dates

Outputs date related text based relating to an RSS item. Used to add date related text, such as “Posted on Wednesday” to your templates that automatically updates when your RSS feed is populated.

<rssitemday />

Outputs the day of the month attached to each post. For example for a post from the 3rd of January the <rssitemday> tag would output "3".

<rssitemdayname />

Outputs the name of the day attached to each post. For example "Tuesday".

<rssitemmonth />

Outputs the number of the month attached to each post. For example for a post from January the <rssitemmonth /> tag would output "1".

<rssitemmonthname />

Outputs the name of the month attached to each post. For example "January".

<rssitemyear />

Outputs the year attached to each post. For example "2011".

RSS Title <rsstitle tocitem />

The title of the content item.

Options

tocitem

Adding the tocitem parameter will include the item in the table of contents for the template.

RSS Body <rssbody paragraphs="" />

Use this tag to insert one or more paragraphs from the post into your campaign. By default, the full entry will be used. Note: Some RSS feeds don't actually contain the entire item, instead inserting a summary. Campaign Monitor can only access whatever is in the RSS feed itself.

Options

paragraphs=''

The optional paragraphs attribute lets you decide how many paragraphs from each item (from zero to as many as you like) to insert into your campaign. Possible values are "all" or any numeral from 0 and up. If you enter numeral 3 for example, then the first three paragraphs will be included.

Example Use

<rssbody paragraphs="2" />

<p>This is the first paragraph from the body of the post</p>
            <p>This is the second paragraph from the body of the post.</p>
            <p><a href="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/samplepost/">Read more</a>

RSS Table of Contents <tableofcontents>

Creates an automated list of every title in a RSS data repeater that includes the <rsstitle tocitem /> attribute in your template.

Example Use

<ul>
                    <tableofcontents>
                            <li>
                                    <repeatertitle/>
                            </li>
                    </tableofcontents>
            </ul>

<ul>
                    <li>
                            <a href="#1">This is my first title</a>
                    </li>
                    <li>
                            <a href="#2">This is another title</a>
                    </li>
                    <li>
                            <a href="#3">I like titles</a>
                    </li>
            </ul>

Facebook Share <fbshare>

Creates a link to share the email campaign (or a specified URL) on Facebook. If you don't insert text or image content between the tags, the default Share button image will be shown instead. If you use this tag inside a datarepeater, this shares the actual RSS post, not the email itself.

<fbshare></fbshare>

[fbshare]

Options

likeurl=''

Set the address of a page you'd like your subscribers to share on Facebook.

<fbshare likeurl="https://abcwidgets.com">
                    Share ABC Widgets on Facebook
            </fbshare>

Tweet <tweet>

Creates a link to Tweet the public web URL for the email campaign. If you don't insert text or image content between the tags, the default Tweet image will be shown instead.

<tweet></tweet>

[tweet]

Options

via=''

This lets you insert a twitter handle that will be mentioned in the tweet as the originator.

recommend=''

This will show the included twitter user as a follow suggestion, after the tweet is posted.

<tweet via="buzzusborne" recommend="campaignmonitor">
                    <img src="http://abcwidgets.com/twitter-custom.gif" />
            </tweet>

Layout

By specifying one or more layouts inside a repeater block, you can have multiple separate designs inside the one repeating element. A simple example would be having one story layout with a left-aligned image, and another with a right-aligned image and different background color. Each layout can be completely different, and can include any number of RSS items inside. When imputing RSS content, we'll just loop through each of the layouts provided for each item in the feed.

Example Use

<datarepeater type="rss" src="http://abcwidgets.com">
                    <layout>
                    <h4><rsstitle tocitem></h4>
                    <p>Posted by <rssauthor /> on <rssitemday />/<rssitemmonth /></p>
                    <rssimage width="600" />
                    <rssbody paragraphs="all" />
                    </layout>

                    <layout>
                    <h4><rsstitle tocitem></h4>
                    <p>Posted by <rssauthor /> on <rssitemday />/<rssitemmonth /></p>
                    <rssbody paragraphs="1" />
                    </layout>
            </datarepeater>

<h4><a href="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/widget-king-crowned/">King Widget!</a></h4>
            <p>Posted by WidgetLover on 04/13</p>
            <img src="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/images/coronation.jpg" width="600" />
            <p>The Coronation of King Widget II was the ceremony in which the newly ascended monarch,
            Wilbur Widget II, was crowned King of the Widgets.</p>
            <p>The ceremony took place at Euro WidgetWorld on December 3rd, 2011...</p>

            <h4><a href="http://abcwidgets.com/posts/auction-update/">Auction update</a></h4>
            <p>Posted by WidgetLover on 02/20</p>
            <p>Get all the latest updates on our Widget Auctions.</p>
            <p><a href="">Read more</a></p>